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Explore Tor, New York City! A New Meetup Starting Dec 7

The Tor community is vast and deep yet remains a virtual entity outside periodic physical events. In New York City on December 7, we are going to start to change that.

Current and future Tor relay operators will assemble on the 20th floor of 150 Broadway, in the LMHQ shared meeting space, at 6:45 PM. This face-to-face gathering is an opportunity to meet others who run Tor relays in NYC, and for those investigating the possibility of running a relay or a bridge.

The meeting will open with a short introduction, then move into a discussion with relay operators.

If you run a Tor relay or bridge, or wonder what's involved in running one, this meeting is a great opportunity to get input from others. NYC apartments and offices are filled with high-bandwidth connections, and there is plenty to spare to help users around the world facing censorship and surveillance.

We are looking to hold meetings every two months in NYC about other related topics going forward. Future ideas for Tor-focused gatherings are in the works, with input appreciated. Leave a comment below!

Other topics under consideration for Explore Tor, NYC! meetups include:

hands-on workshop on installation of Tor Browser for desktop and mobile

>< old web sites : yes , it suits at Tor (compliant with their old model/guide-line).
>< N.Y. city : yes, it suits at Tor (compliant with govt-google request).
- Tor is unsecure and not built anonymity/privacy in mind : 1024 rsa ... and not accepted as privacy tool outside of new-york.

As long as the laws will block the elementary rights such the encryption, to be the exclusive owner of his digital data/live & his hardware/laptop/raspberry ; a tool like Tor should be locked at N.Y. (u.s kidtoy for u.s retarded only).

2. For decades, ATT has practically fallen over itself in its eagerness to assist NSA in illegal targeted and dragnet surveillance schemes.

3. Therefore [sic], Tor Project should not host meetups in NYC.

Surely the absurdity of this argument is apparent?

>> Tor is unsecure and not built anonymity/privacy in mind :

Anyone can easily verify the origins of Tor from the statements at torproject.org. Indeed, the people who developed the onion concept have sometimes posted in the tor-talk mailing list with their recollections of their early work on Tor. The truth, anonymity was the primary goal of Tor from the first, and it would be absurd for anyone to suggest otherwise.

> 1024 rsa ...

Can't tell what you are trying to suggest here, but let me say this: current Tor is a rather complicated and constantly evolving thing. In terms of security, developers often make tough choices which are revisited from time to time. That said, I don't understand your reference to 1024 bit (key length?) RSA.

> and not accepted as privacy tool outside of new-york.

"Tor is not accepted as a privacy tool outside of NYC?" [sic]. Seriously, is that what you are trying to suggest?

> As long as the laws will block the elementary rights such the encryption, to be the exclusive owner of his digital data/live & his hardware/laptop/raspberry;

Governments which serve malware to "targets" are taking a considerable risk, because sometimes a technically able "target" can capture the malware, reverse engineer it, and then publish it, with attribution. Such a prospect tends to make certain governments sound somewhat hysterical.

Er, sorry, you were saying?

> a tool like Tor should be locked at N.Y. (u.s kidtoy for u.s retarded only).

Are you trying to suggest that Tor is a "children's toy" [sic] which would be used only by "foolish Americans" [sic]?

Interesting that so many governments appear to be so anxious to make themselves look weak and terrified by their strenuous attempts to discourage anyone anywhere from using Tor for anything.

It looks like you do not use TBB or a Relay and you like argument in a pleasant & friendly manner but you do not understand & do not know what you are speaking about.
- 1024 rsa & cha 1 are obsolete , unsecure and do not allow anonymity or privacy : it is a technical fact not a philosophical argument.
- You cannot promote a tool labelled as "universal" or flagged as a "freedom appeal for the world" when it works only for usa guys in the usa : every user knows that and your humorous answer is more ridiculous than serious.

Tor is govt & google compliant : it can't be used without to be registered or recorded, censured.
Tor was build for uneducated person in danger most often in the usa : it is related at their weak health/resources/status/intellect ... another way to live together, another way to play a politic role, another way to denounce with Privacy in mind-Anonymously the state police and their brutal behavior.
Nothing to do with the "world" or a Democracy_Republic ... just a civil report not done before by the officials military forces which police/fbi/cia/nsa.

The next generation of onions will maybe solve that but will not be too late ?

Tor is not exportable : it is prohibited (encryption & to be the owner of your data/hardware) almost everywhere ... taxes, provocation, brutality, jail, mental hospital etc. until a suicide or a manipulation ...
usa is not welcome almost everywhere because the rogues states (e.u/fr/uk e.g.) win and because the precedent presidents gone too far (& during too much time) in an abject, cruel, cupid, brutal, insane, sick politic & personal deviant behavior : that is a fact, a historic fact.
I trust more the new president of the united states than the last for listening & reacting with force & good faith.

Tor runs only on a stable & real democracy : it is a matter of honestly and N.Y.C is a test or the last refuge.

Oh I see, no longer Nice; they've rebranded as Cyberbit. Someone must be feeling... un-masked.

But if privacy were truly dead, Cyberbit would not be concerned about a bit of public exposure, eh?

> but you do not understand & do not know what you are speaking about

As I said, I am experiencing difficulty in understanding what you are complaining about, upon what factual basis (if any), and what if anything you expect anyone to do about the situation.

I get the impression that

o you *want* to use Tor

o you live in a country where it is more difficult to use Tor than (so far) in the USA

o but you aren't mad at your government, you are mad at Tor Project.

If there's logic to that line of thought, please explain.

> 1024 rsa & cha 1 are obsolete , unsecure and do not allow anonymity or privacy : it is a technical fact not a philosophical argument.

I appreciate that, but I still don't follow. You'll have to be more specific.

Are you complaining about Tor client/server software, about the TP blog, a website associated with the meetup venue, or what?

How are RSA and CHA-1 involved?

What precisely are the security flaws?

What is the threat model which makes these flaws so serious that Tor(?) "does not allow anonymity or privacy"?

It would be helpful if you would be more specific about the country in which you are experiencing problems using Tor.

> You

Just to be clear: I am a Tor user, but not affiliated with Tor Project.

> cannot promote a tool labeled as "universal" or flagged as a "freedom appeal for the world" when it works only for usa guys in the usa

Why do you think that Tor "works only for usa guys in the usa"?

Plenty of users around the world consider that Tor works for them. To be sure, in some countries you may have to use bridges and it may be more difficult to connect to the Tor network than it is (currently) in the USA. I am very worried that it may soon become just as difficult to use Tor in the USA, so if you want TP to post an explainer on bridges and using Tor in a repressive country, I also would like to see such a blog post.

> every user knows that

In which country? It would really help if you could explain in more detail why you have been frustrated in your unsuccessful attempts (?) to use Tor.

> and your humorous answer is more ridiculous than serious.

Cute :-)

> Tor is govt & google compliant

You said that before, and clearly both claims require explanation and evidence. Please provide them.

> it can't be used without to be registered or recorded, censured.

Tor cannot be used without being... registered? In what countries?

It appears to be true that in some repressive countries, citizens are required to register their real names with social media sites, but I haven't heard of requirements that Tor users register (with... the government?) as Tor users. If you know otherwise, please explain, ideally with a link to a government website stating the regulation in question.

Tor cannot be used without being... recorded?

By NSA, you mean? It is true that the Snowden leaks confirm that NSA attempts to record all encrypted datastreams sent/received anywhere in the world, and Tor datastreams are strongly encrypted, so I agree it follows that in this sense, almost anyone using encryption for any purpose (e.g. connecting to a bank, using a smart phone, not just using Tor) is being "recorded", by NSA and no doubt by other actors with global aspirations.

However, the Snowden leaks also show that NSA and its partners were having great difficulties illicitly decrypting such datastreams c. 2011, so they were (are) trying to store them all for decades, in hopes that quantum decryption with allow them to read everything decades later. But it seems clear that no-one, including NSA, really knows how this will play out during the 21st century.

Further, the Snowden leaks show that NSA was unable to effectively attack Tails, and a salient point here is that at the time of the failed attacks described in the leaks, Tails (and its parent Linux distributions) suffered from some horrible defects which would have made it easy for NSA to compromise Tails users, but they obviously simply did not know about the flaw. This was not a flaw in Tails, but a flaw in the Linux software it had inherited from parent distributions.

(Tails is the "OS on a USB/DVD" which is "amnesiac" and provides careful anonymity protections---Tor Browser and much more--- out of the box. Tails is often used by journalists, medical aid workers, human rights workers and political dissidents in dangerous places. Snowden himself used Tails while preparing to leak. People can donate to tails at tails.boum.org. I am a Tails user, but not affiliated with Tails Project.)

Sadly, these days, for more and more citizens of every nation, every place is dangerous.

I worry about Google too, but I have no idea what you might mean by "Google compliant" or why you think Tor is any such thing, or what you expect Tor Project to do about it.

Customers of US telcos such as Verizon should maybe worry more about Nice (now Cyberbit) than Google, since it appears that these companies have for at least a decade hired Nice to track their own customers. How do they do it? Probably this:

thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/363533-how-the-nsa-could-spy-on-any-american-phone-without-congressional
How the NSA could spy on any American phone — without congressional approval
Shay Hershkovitz, opinion contributor
6 Dec 2017

Hershkovitz says its the NSA which is abusing SS7 to record PSTN (public switched telephone network) calls inside the USA, but I think the evidence suggests that it is actually Nice (Cyberbit), and that this company has actually been hired by the big telcos themselves. Note that the implication is that Nice is listening to and recording the calls themselves, possibly in violation of US law. NSA insists that it doesn't do that (to Americans), but it is very likely that it simply snatches the recordings as they exit the USA for Israel, where the Cyberbit spooks work. The Snowden leaks contain many specific examples of the fact that NSA is in the habit, not of notifying victims of foreign espionage (e.g. an Israeli company spying on USPER phone call content), but of happily copying the "take", and passing it on to their own "partners".

To be sure, anyone can claim to be a telecom and abuse SS7 the same way the professionals do.

> Tor was build for uneducated person in danger most often in the usa

You seem to be pushing this claim pretty hard. Trouble is, it is directly contradicted by authoritative statements from the originators of Tor, e.g.

> The original goal of Tor was to gain experience in deploying an anonymizing overlay net-work, and learn from having actual users...

Nick Matthewson has given more detail in posts to the Tor-talk mailing list, but I can't find them right now. As I recall, he said that NRL (Naval Research Laboratory) was interested in having a way for USG staff deployed to a dangerous location for Americans (a current example would be a US State Dept person posted to the new US embassy in Jerusalem) to communicate, for example from their home, without telegraphing that they are USG employees.

A key element in the original vision was that by providing strong anonymity for all, the USG employees could "hide in the noise". This has proven to be so effective that US LEAs (law enforcement agencies) have used Tor to hide their affiliation while investing on-line drugmarts, for example. Further, some in NRL were apparently enthusiastic about helping political dissidents in repressive countries (this was before 9/11, remember) to communicate with outside groups. This was so effective that the most repressive countries have turned to espionage-as-a-service companies such as Gamma International, Hacking Team, and Cyberbit. For more information, please see this recent item from Wired, by the director of Citizen Lab:

> Nothing to do with the "world" or a Democracy_Republic ... just a civil report not done before by the officials military forces which police/fbi/cia/nsa.

?

> The next generation of onions will maybe solve that but will not be too late ?

?

> Tor is not exportable : it is prohibited (encryption & to be the owner of your data/hardware) almost everywhere ...

Some civil rights groups attempt to track privacy laws worldwide. This is very difficult and involves precisely the kind of international communication which is enabled by Tor, against the wishes of some governments. According to my understanding, Tor is not explicitly proscribed in very many countries. According to my understanding, the USG prohibition on exporting cryptography has been largely moot since the 1990's "cryptowar", which was decisively *lost* by NSA.

If you can provide specifics of a particular law somewhere in the world, please do so.

> usa is not welcome almost everywhere because the rogues states (e.u/fr/uk e.g.) win

You mean to say EU actually *won* something? You mean, like an Olympic medal?

Good for them, they need a win.

> and because the precedent presidents gone too far (& during too much time) in an abject, cruel, cupid, brutal, insane, sick politic & personal deviant behavior : that is a fact, a historic fact.

If you are thinking of such deplorable incidents as the U.S. militaries repeated "accidental" bombing of hospitals run by MSF (Doctors without Borders), then I completely agree that the USG has behaved very badly. Alas, so have many other governments: the RU bombing of civilians in Syria and the Saudi bombing of civilians in Yemen are without doubt among the most atrocious human rights violations of the century... so far.

> I trust more the new president of the united states than the last for listening & reacting with force & good faith.

IMO Obama was the smartest and most likable US President in history, not excepting George Washington (renowned in his own time for his compelling personal magnetism) or FDR. He is also without doubt a war criminal because of the methods (e.g. signature drone strikes) he adopted with such enthusiasm in the so-called GWOT. His immediate predecessor, G. W. Bush, is also a war criminal for the same reason, plus CIA torture and secret prisons. Both men should be prosecuted in the ICC for their crimes, and it is not impossible that eventually they will be.

Unfortunately, other world leaders are clearly also war criminals, e.g.

IMO Drump is the most dangerous, mentally incompetent, and emotionally unstable US President in history (not excepting Andrew Jackson or Millard Fillmore), and also the one most prone to authoritarianism, and even to promoting an American genocide. For a review of the warning signs which have historically preceded state-sponsored genocides, see

IMO, contrary to common perception inside the US, the authoritarian impulse owes more to his troubled nature and to CN influence than to RU influence. And the genocidal impulse arises not from the original Nazis, but from the homegrown American phenomenon which provided so much of the pseudo-intellectual "justification" for Nazi genocides, the KKK.

Sad times, truly sad times...

> Tor runs only on a stable & real democracy

Earlier I think you appeared to say Tor is usable only by people inside the US. It would seem to follow that you believe that the USA is a stable and true democracy.

An authoritative and recent contrary view from inside "the swamp" can be found here:

One of the authors of the essays collected in this book frankly admits that the USA has never been a true democracy. And the entire book is full of worries that the USA is far from stable, particularly against internal threats.

You will also be intrigued to find that one author says in essence that Drump and the alt right are more dangerous to the future of the USA than the late and unlamented bin Laden ever was. But another author argues that in order to survive as a single nation the USA will need to become much more authoritarian (after the Chinese model, not the Russian model, I assume).

A few months before his retirement in Oct 2016 as chief of SOCNORTH (the US Special Forces Command division which operates inside the US itself), Rear Adm. Kerry Metz granted an interview to John Gresham (better known as Tom Clancy's collaborator on numerous novels) in which he makes several intriguing statements; see

> "For us here at SOCNORTH, it’s everything from counterterrorism to countering WMD to countering transnational organized crime, or helping our Mexican partners with that, [and] civil support, usually to the lead federal agency in our theater, in our case most often the FBI... We spend a lot of time talking, working with, and discussing with our various interagency partners: FBI, DHS [Department of Homeland Security], CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration], the State Department... We could get into a longer discussion on Posse Comitatus, but some people often think that that prevents military personnel from doing anything in the homeland [inside the USA]. That’s not true. There are certain categories of support the military can provide. A piece of equipment, advice… there are many things the U.S. military can do to support whoever the lead federal agency is, and you’re not in violation. It’s direct military participation in law enforcement that Posse Comitatus prevents."

IOW, inside the USA, Special Forces can do everything but arrest or shoot civilians. But that might change:

> ... the work [of SOCNORTH] is becoming more important than we considered it in the past, because while we’ve been doing a great job fighting the “away game,” more and more we get indications that the adversaries are trying to bring it to our court. And we may have to play the home game as well.

IOW, in coming decades, SOCNORTH may be called upon to fight inside the US itself.

This does not sound to me like an expression of undying military faith in the continued political stability of the USA.

Where inside the USA does SOCNORTH expect it may have to fight? A clue comes from another recent military study:

publicintelligence.net/usarmy-megacities/
Megacities and the U.S. Army: Preparing for a Complex and Uncertain Future
6 Dec 2014
Forward by Gen. Ray Odierno, Chief of Staff, US Army.

Upon the personal request of Gen. Odierno, a task force visited and studied several cities with populations of more than a million, cities where Gen. Odierno expects the Army may be called upon to fight in coming decades. As you can see, one of these cities was NYC.

> it is a matter of honestly and N.Y.C is a test or the last refuge.

Are you saying that NYC is the last refuge of democracy?

Bill Blasio will be glad to hear this!

IMO, NYC is currently run too much like a security state for any citizen to feel safe... from the government. But it's a complicated situation and there are also good people in parts of the NYC government, maybe even parts of the US, Russian, Chinese governments. For example, here is a shout out to the health workers in RU who are trying to quell the all-drug-resistant tuberculosis crisis, and the US NGO which helps them.

Unfortunately, the SMA document cited above shows that the elements of the US military regard such international medical aid cooperation as a threat to US "national security".

PLEASE _ let this comment be published.
- thank you for your answer but like it is written above ; you are misinformed, lacking of intelligence.
In short , you speak for yourself to yourself.
A public blog like this one is for the readers who are involved, concerned & aware ; you are not.
When you post , you must follow at least some clear & simple principles like these one :
- good faith (you failed)
- truth (you failed)
- evidence, clue, link, background, reputation. (you failed)
and do not mix a blog with a mailing-list ... or a discussion in the street waiting the bus ... it is that you are doing ...
Your ideas, opinions, point of views, demonstrations, are yours as respectable than everybody else but are irrelevant , off topic and outside of a real world.steve@airmail.nz that is my address and you can contact me except if you are on gmail/yahoo/isp-mail.

> Governments which serve malware to "targets" are taking a considerable risk, because sometimes a technically able "target" can capture the malware, reverse engineer it, and then publish it, with attribution. Such a prospect tends to make certain governments sound somewhat hysterical.

And here is a good example of why misgovernments everywhere are quaking in their jackboots:

> This report describes how Ethiopian dissidents in the US, UK, and other countries were targeted with emails containing sophisticated commercial spyware posing as Adobe Flash updates and PDF plugins. Targets include a US-based Ethiopian diaspora media outlet, the Oromia Media Network (OMN), a PhD student, and a lawyer. During the course of our investigation, one of the authors of this report was also targeted.

> We are looking to hold meetings every two months in NYC about other related topics going forward. Future ideas for Tor-focused gatherings are in the works, with input appreciated. Leave a comment below!

Fabulous! TP needs to continually reach out to "techies" in major population centers, in order to build the volunteer base we need to run relays, perform development, assist research, staff help desks, respond to technical/political crises, and reach out to local/national/international media.

NYC is a great place to start organizing regular meetups. I hope this goes well and that success in NYC will eventually lead to regular meetups in other major cities around the world.

Great. Unfortunately I live in Brazil and I can attend this spectacular day. I met the Tor project a few years ago. I was never so amazed by the idea of ​​anonymity and freedom of expression that the project provides. I wish everyone good luck in this day.

the idea is generous but the security/anonymity settings are sneak.
good luck , hoping that it will be lived with an opened mind & a soft tolerance.
Donate to tor project & make a pressure to mozilla team for a better secure browser (1024 rsa is a shame !).
i love this u.s.a. : they are the voice of the freedom, truth & honor.

Totally agree that Brazil should be near the top of the list for countries where TP should try to start having regular meetups in Sao Paulo and Rio.

USPERs concerned about police shootings should check out what happens in Rio, omigod.

Also, Brazil has been hit hard by some state sponsored attacks (and the government in Brazil may make some of its own). Don't even get me started on attacks on environmental defenders.

It's the same all over: Iran, Cuba, Vietnam all have environmentalists, and they are all harrassed or worse by local and national government officials.

I'd like to see TP and human rights groups try to reach out to Brazilian secondary school students. We need a generation of dreamers who start to dream about a career defending people against all the bad forces which are harming them, including misgovernments.

I've seen that too recently, at salon.com I think. (Not the first time I had seen that message somewhere, but I hadn't seen it for a while.)

I think this means that your destination server is running Nginx under Ubuntu and making the simplistic/harmful/wrong assumption that "all Tor traffic has bad intent" [sic]. I would welcome correction if anyone knows otherwise.

It is true that FBI agents won't have a long walk from the NYC Field Office to the Tor meetup.

So what? We get to play "spot the Fed", that's all.

John Young of Cryptome.org, who is an architect, would make an ideal guide in a walking tour of surveillance state installations in lower Manhattan.

Other places of interest which are not very far from 150 Broadway include the site of the Wall Street horse-cart bombing. FBI never did figure out who was responsible for that, a fact they'd prefer that everyone forget.

Down the block be sure to notice 1 E 91st (overlooking Central Park), the setting for the movie "The Anderson Tapes", starring Sean Connery. The plot centers around an illegal bugging operation of a rather shady character who lives in the building. In the end, as the operation is about to be exposed, the tapes are hastily destroyed.

A few blocks away is the house where CIA's "best agent", a Czech emigre, lived for decades. Used to tell great stories about fabulously bungled secret CIA ops. One of his neighbors was inspired to create a TV comedy, "Get Smart", following a bumbling secret agent who suffers from Dunning-Kroger syndrome. A few years ago newly opened state archives in Europe revealed an interesting fact: the CIA's "best agent" had been a double agent for USSR who spent his career spying on CIA from the inside. Then another newly opened archive revealed another interesting fact: he'd actually been working for the Czech intelligence service all along, spying on USSR espionage operations inside the USA, while pretending to spy on CIA for USSR, while pretending to spy on Americans for CIA. And having a blast the whole time, it seems.

Don't know about Russian trolls specifically, but here are two recent examples of two different false claims (both harmful to Tor if they come to be widely believed) which were made in comments in the Tor blog:

> The Tor node operators colluded to prevent the DailyStormer onion service from working by throttling/blacklisting connections to them.

(Debunked by pastly. The fake claim about DailyStormer is a recurrent meme which is possibly being given extra life not only by disgruntled neonazis, but also by more powerful adversaries of Tor community.)

I am reading a lot of pretentious and arrogant claims about what are doing "actors of the net" or elected persons on this blog and i wonder the reason why so many people like spread/spoof using fake news and 'false claims' [ neo-nazis ( no ! ) ,an israeli/ movement promoting the right of rapist (yes ! that's true) ].

The freedom of speech is not a passport for the calumnies & other washing brain/ manipulation.

It is very far of a troll / a russian comment : it is a discourse of a disturbed mind who use the net for be forgiven of his cowardliness. I tell this person that a blog is not a church, a court, an idiot closed community where the perversity is welcome.

You cannot win against the devil but you can denounce him : support Tor making a donation please.

One type of disinformation campaign which has been used by various governments to target human rights groups and political dissidents, and which I think we can reasonably expect our many enemies to use against Tor, is an attempt to discredit NGOs or their employees in some way.

The way this kind of operations works is simple: a shill feeds a fake and debunkable email, document, etc. to a careless reporter who works for the targeted media information, waits for the false story to appear, then feeds links to information which prove the story false to competing news organizations.

It appears to be a current info ops strategy of some governments which USG regards as "adversarial" to do everything they can to further reduce the opinion of US citizens generally of their own mass media, on the theory that this increases distrust of the government, spreads paranoia, and encourages citizens to withdraw from even trying to participate in the political process.

I think TP needs to try harder to explain to not-hopelessly-biased mainstream reporters that Tor is not really part of this problem, but part of a plausible solution to this problem.

As an example: recently an amateur attempted to discredit a mainstream US news organization using such an operation, and got caught. (She was apparently working for a US alt-right advocacy group whose mission is to destroy the US media, not for a foreign government.) And last week, a still unknown actor duped CNN into claiming an enormous scoop involving Wikileaks which was debunked within minutes by WaPo:

> Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

Those with long (multi-year) memories will recall that Greenwald himself was targeted, along with a TP employee and Wikileaks, by an disinformation op planned by the CEO of H.B. Gary Federal, a company which went bankrupt after hackers broke into their poorly secured mail server and exfiltrated a treasure trove of presentations and emails showing how well-connected (the CEO had previously been cybersecurity czar for the largest US arms maker) privatized spooks think and behave.

The US "Deep State" is currently hellbent upon pushing a false "meme" holding that "WL is the catspaw of RU intelligence" [sic]. This cannot be true, because WL helped publish both Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, and no government figures are more harmed by these tax-evasion disclosures that President Putin of RU and President Xi of CN. Greenwald has been pretty much the only US media figure to caution against rushing to judgment regarding WL's role in the DNC hacking scandal.

Such considerations would appear to support the suggestion that TP should stand prepared to respond promptly and effectively to information ops targeting TP or its employees, whatever their source (which in most cases are not likely to ever become known with certainty).

That's probably often the best approach, in the case of specific blog comments.

I should have made it clear I am concerned about the phenomenon of "information ops" (in the current political context inside the US, especially RU government sponsored ops) and how they might be used to discredit the Tor community. I am concerned that dishonest/misguided politicians will attempt to make Tor illegal inside the US. Because Tor Project is an NGO registered in the US, that would be a big problem for Tor users everywhere. I hope it never happens, but I think TP should try hard to prevent it from happening, by pushing back in the political arena against our dangerous enemies (arguably FBI rather than FSB or GRU).

It is never the best approach and i insist & persist : our dangerous enemies are not inside but outside especially in the e.u. in the hart of the rogue-state.
US § FSB are very far of the devil plan which you complain : prove that they do, when, how, why pls.
Tor is an association , often a hoax, do you really think that a country should waste time & money for a poorly secured app blocked at ny most of time ?
Tor using its american status protect the users who are living abroad.
Making Tor illegal in the u.s.a should be a good thing : it will bring more users & more relays.
So, only Tor-team has a benefit of these 'unstable' fake news.
Are they the authors of this campaign ?

Other US military manuals and GCHQ documents leaked by Snowden outline how the "Deep State" conducts its own "information operations", e.g. targeting Glen Greenwald, but these may more helpful in recognizing that one is being subjected to an "information operation" than in defending against them.

Another essay in the book just cited states the author's opinion that Russian government has been more effective than the Chinese government in influencing American thought. I claim that just the opposite is true, and I think the author's mistake arises from a failure to study Chinese government influence operations which focus on the American business community. For example, when President Xi visited the US, he made a point of staying the night in Bill Gates's mansion. Not saying Gates is necessarily an easy "mark" for Chinese influence, just saying that I see plenty of evidence that the Chinese government is very effectively if quietly reshaping the US tech giants to suit its own needs. It's hard to imagine Bill Gates inviting Putin over a slumber party.

> This face-to-face gathering is an opportunity to meet others who run Tor relays in NYC, and for those investigating the possibility of running a relay or a bridge.

Has TP managed to get this meetup publicized in NYC alternative newspapers, alternative radio, etc?

It's terribly important that Tor get some not-bad press right now, in view of political machinations in Washington DC, so I hope relay operators will be willing to try to explain to reporters why Tor is actually a good thing, despite all the horrible things one might hear from FBI and their shills in the mainstream media.

no, please.
- tell the truth , do not clash tor aficionados vs official news.
- explain slowly & quietly what is tor & why tor runs : pedagogy.
if the population reject tor , bad press & Washington dc will relay it on the news : they do not create always the (fake) opinions , they are also the voice of the most people.

I hope Tor recruits many new node operators at the meetup. Focusing on the why and how of running a node seems a good place to start, but I hope you will find time to discuss possible topics for the next meeting.

In particular, I hope there will be interest in developing what the US "Deep State" calls a "narrative" or "messenging strategy" to counter the unrelenting disinformation about Tor being promoted by FBI and their allies.

Publicintelligence.net has just republished a very useful (unclassified, openly published) book from SMA (one of the many "think tanks" maintained by the US military) which lays out how the "Deep State" currently view "influence operations", such as operations whose goal is to (for example)

o dissuade people from using Tor, assisting or donating to Tor Project,

The authors of the essays include people from SOCNORTH (the US Special Operations Command division which operates inside the USA and is based at Peterson AFB in Colorado Springs), John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (also does stuff for NSA), NCTC, NSI (National Security Innovations, which has offices in Arlington, Boston), RAND (formerly a Tor sponsor, ironically enough), and various universities.

Several of the essays explicitly say that the US military views NGOs (e.g. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, Tor) as players it needs to spy on, influence, or worse. Authors specifically say that the threats which concern them include "increased activism by nonstate actors", including peaceful NGOs, and "domestic information environment", including Facebook. At least one essay is pretty frank in suggesting that the US will need to become much more authoritarian to survive the coming social upheavals.

The book is well worth reading by everyone who wants to see Tor thrive all around the world.

Several authors also underline the fact that SOCOM (Special Operations Command) including SOCNORTH has a particular interest in using neuroscience, new nanodrone and brain scanning technologies, and new cyberwar techniques against "national security threats" which have expanded to include NGOs operating legally inside the USA.

SOCNORTH actively collaborates with FBI inside the USA, targeting alleged potential national security threats. Posse Comitatus prohibits Special Ops soldiers from actively arresting or shooting at US persons inside the US (outside military bases and other critical infrastructure areas), but they can and so assist in every other way, e.g. with surveillance, undercover penetrations (e.g. burglaries--- the federal euphemism is "covert building access"), access to military intelligence databases such as those kept and sometimes carelessly exposed by INSCOM (NSA's liason with the military and thus FBI through SOCNORTH).

Don't believe it because I say so, believe it because Rear Admiral Kerry M. Metz said so, in a June 2016 interview with John Gresham (better known for his collaboration with Tom Clancy on several novels). Metz commanded SOCNORTH until his retirement a few months after the interview.

Perhaps the most interesting comment he made was this: "while we’ve been doing a great job fighting the “away game,” more and more we get indications that the adversaries are trying to bring it to our court. And we may have to play the home game as well." In other words, SOCOM is training to fight inside US cities, because it expects it may be called upon to fight inside those same US cities.

Fight what? A civil war? Quite possibly: the same book cited above contains several casual references to the fact that the Deep State views Steve Bannon as a figure no less dangerous than the late Bin Laden. (Personally I think that's an underestimation of Bannon, but I'd be happy to see Deep State and the Alt Right destroy each other, hopefully without recourse to a literal civil war, so long as a more pacific and less malicious government emerges from the chaos.)

> We are looking to hold meetings every two months in NYC about other related topics going forward. Future ideas for Tor-focused gatherings are in the works, with input appreciated. Leave a comment below!

+ provide onion site access to ADS-B tracking data, e.g. to track US federal spyplanes active in the greater New York area (I can give a list of tail numbers and squawks current as of Dec 2015).

+ provide high quality regional maps on which to overlay the tracking data, showing urban areas and identifying airports, military bases, and possibly parks, colleges and hospitals, as well as identifying major roads; Google Maps does this but they themselves spy the heck out of their users, so civil libertarians need an alternative (and you can certainly use UScensus TIGER/Line shapefiles and USGS topographic data to make high quality maps which are at least as good as Google for our purposes); note that to track FBI you usually need a map which covers one or two dozen adjacent counties so sousveillance of spyplanes throws up unusual mapping challenges

o Create a citizen RF "regional intranet" for NYC using Raspberry Pi B (which include WiFi) and have strong end to end encryption

o Map Surveillance State installations and suspicious indications of cell-site simulators (probably not all operated by USG) in NYC,

o (controversial) since the FBI is too distracted running sting operations to try to gauge foreign espionage in NYC, spy on the *other* (not USG) spies,

o Use Tails and "war-driving" to map the electromagnetic signaling environment in NYC (the power companies are doing this--- it's called "spectrum auditing"--- so we citizens should find out for ourselves what's happening in the EM spectrum where we live),

o White hat tools for cybersecurity researchers; for example, can we use Tor to check on whether our DJI drone is really sending geolocation information back to China, as "Deep State" claims?

> Future ideas for Tor-focused gatherings are in the works, with input appreciated. Leave a comment below!

o Plan a grassroots movement in which NY Tor and human rights communities reach out to NYC high schools, to offer
+ training for defensive surfing (e.g. using Tor Browser, how PKI certs work and how they sometimes dont work, end to end crypto), patterned on EFF's courses (see eff.org),
+ training in recognizing "fake news" and maintaining some semblance of sentencingproject.orgsanity in general, while participating in social networks,
+ counter the false "privacy is dead" and "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" memes (c.f. actor Jennifer Lawrence--- if privacy is dead, why is she upset about private photos spaffed all over the internet?)
+ teach about the many hazards to privacy, taking a long view; "what you say today might come back to harm you in ten years when you are trying to get a new job",
+ teach about history of social struggle in NYC, e.g. NYC area Tories during the Revolution, Typhoid Mary, Wall Street buggy bombing, Palmer raids, labor struggles,
+ (controversial) teach about probabilistic and statistical reasoning (e.g. debunking news stories using government stats, teach about the mysterious "murder hump" and how to recognize "fake stats" about gun violence in the US),
+ (controversial) teach about the dangers to people who are in high school right now from NCTC's steady march toward implementing a US counterpart to China's "jasmine credit" system of social control (in which political dissidents are punished by not getting into the college of their choice, being barred from renting or working or getting a loan), perhaps even implementing a counterpart of North Korean style political prison farms populated, not by people the USG suspects of having done anything wrong, but by people whom the USG's unsupervised machine learning algorithms have declared are "more likely than the average person" [sic] to "do something wrong" in the *future*,
+ talks by ACLU lawyers etc on careers in human rights; "you can be a lawyer who doesn't work to perpetuate social injustice" (see the fab stats at sentencingproject.org, but not near meal times because you'll lose your lunch).

o Liase with Southern Poverty Law Center (splc.org) to reach out to NYC schools to
+ discuss our bad experience with the fallout from Gamergate (c.f. bullying in schools),
+ counter alt-right hate messaging,
+ counter the anti-Tor anti-civil-rights messaging from FBI, etc,
+ offer a peacenik alternative to "Deep State" recruitment aimed at young people, e.g. TV dramas like Quantico, Seal Team; "you can be a cyberwarrior who doesn't kill and doesn't work for the US military or the big banks or the telcos or SalesForce".

o Organize to fight for citizen broadband in NYC (this will be tough, since you're taking on ATT and FCC and all them like that).

I think it will be evident to Tor people why I think all of the above are consistent with the goals of Tor (the project) and potentially enabled by Tor (the software).

That's why "Onions for Everything" is so promising, it is the best thing I've seen yet to guard against some of the most dangerous kinds of identity theft schemes (the ones executed by rogue governments, abusing a "root" PKI certificate):

> why .onion sites should be an infrastructure component for plain old web sites

> The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is suing the federal government, accusing it of unconstitutionally raiding the homes of immigrant families....SPLC brought the suit on behalf of three families caught in a targeted sweep of immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala on Jan. 2-3, 2016. In one instance, the complaint alleges, ICE agents claimed to be police searching for criminal suspects and threatened to arrest a family member for obstructing a fictitious criminal investigation to get into the house. In two other raids, ICE agents allegedly showed the residents a photo of the African-American man they claimed to be looking for. Once inside, SPLC said the officers informed the families they were, in fact, ICE agents. The residents, who were in the country legally, were then seized for detention and deportation.

USMS and ICE often impersonate local cops in situations where they do not actually have legal authority to enter. It is not illegal to ask "which agency?" before opening the door, or to step outside and lock the door behind you. In most cases, ICE does not (yet) have legal authority to simply barge into anyone's house or apartment.

Students of history will be aware that one of the chief motivations for the American Revolution was the notorious "Writs of Assistance", general purpose authorizations from the Crown which allowed colonial officials to barge into any house they pleased at any time.

C.f. the opinion expressed by some authors of essays collected in the latest SMA book (cited in other comments to this blog post) that "the USA needs to become more authoritarian" [sic].

> Future ideas for Tor-focused gatherings are in the works, with input appreciated. Leave a comment below!

o Create a "rapid response network" which tries to locate and correct (calls/letters to the Editor?) every news story about Tor which contains a false or misleading claim about Tor, a more broadly which attempts to correct overuse of such meaningless terms as "dark web" which are being heavily promoted by FBI as part of their war on Tor,

o Brainstorm how to begin to try to persuade the few remaining "less partisan" US mainstream media figures who write about Tor that there is much more to Tor than the allegedly tor-enabled human trafficking and child pron, for example by pointing to the onion mirrors for the Debian repository and the onion site gateways for many hip media outlets, which are much harder to adversaries (who control a root PKI cert they can force into citizen browsers) to systematically block or redirect,

o Brainstorm how to create a human resource network for (genuine) journalists who are trying to write a story on the latest security scare--- start with email addies for Bruce Schneier and other knowledgeable people; a good example of the kind of potential threat which is very hard for most people to assess is the danger posed (or not?) by AMD and Intel "layer -3" Minix hidden uber-uber-uber OSs built into recent CPUs,

o Reach out to NYC high schools to each about dangers posed to ordinary citizens by the rapidly growing frequency and intensity of "information operations" (Russian, British, whomever) and especially state-sponsored malware (e.g. Ethiopian, Mexican, Syrian governments targeting US citizens inside US--- all more or less admitted by FBI to be true phenomena, not "fake news", and all well documented by Citizen Lab in Toronto),

o Reach out (with due caution) to NYC universities to try to create an American counterpart to Citizen Lab, which avoids any funding tainted by USIC or USG "soft power", but relies on the friends of (genuine) journalism (nothing wrong with Citizen Lab--- they do fab work--- but they are just one lab and The People terribly need many more).

> Future ideas for Tor-focused gatherings are in the works, with input appreciated. Leave a comment below!

o Reach out to well established groups like New York Civil Liberties Union for help in training Tor community members in how to lobby politicians effectively,

o Organize call-ins to lobby NYC representatives in the federal and state legislature, the City Council, the Mayor's Office,

o Organize trips to Albany to lobby the state legislature (not an easy sell since it tends to be hostile to NYC concerns and to civil liberties generally),

o Brainstorm more political stunts like the Snowden bust at the revolutionary martyrs in Fort Greene (but this time ask the ACLU to ask Snowden before invoking his image/name again since he wasn't too happy with the bust), perhaps focusing on developing a grassroots backlash to the demise of Net Neutrality; see https://publicintelligence.net/sma-influence-connectedness/ for what looks awfully like a "Deep Stater" who like us is actually worried about what this bodes for the future of "democracy in America", even as he admits that "democracy in America" is more of a never-realized ideal than an established reality.

> Future ideas for Tor-focused gatherings are in the works, with input appreciated. Leave a comment below!

o Rent a school bus and ask John Young (Cryptome.org) to lead high school students on a bus tour of surveillance state sites in Manhattan (for example, Stuyvesant High School is located in lower Manhattan, next to the endpoint of the recent terror-truck attack, and has many very smart techie students).

I would be open to the idea of attending such a different and interesting event. I do not know much about how to run a Tor relay. However, the hosting company's (LMHQ) website is not able to be viewed via Tor itself. It seems somewhat out of touch, to support Tor on one hand via hosting such an event but on the other hand literally not support users who are running tor and trying to access your website.

Pagination

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